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I was told you are all left wing racist loons

At least that is what Billy over at N&P said lol. Not that I take her/him/it seriously at all.

But I would love to see what you all have to say about this article.

Race, Crime and Statistical Malpractice: How the Right Manipulates White Fear With Bogus Data

By Tim Wise

NOTE TO THE READER: Because the below essay involves a lot of data, and some occasionally confusing terminology (and because it’s hard to explain statistical analysis in a reader-friendly way), I am putting the key points in bullets here at the beginning of the piece. For the details as to how these conclusions were reached, and for the links to sources used, please read the full column.

Also, please note that there is some variation in the data claims in this piece, regarding homicide, and the more recent essay on my site, “Nazis Can’t Do Math.” The reason for the discrepancy is that for this piece, I was relying on FBI Homicide data, which is far less complete than the state-by-state data upon which I relied for the newer piece. I was unaware of the more comprehensive data until after this essay had been published, and rather than re-write this essay, I would simply direct persons to that newer article for the most extensive breakdown of interracial homicide data.

Despite claims by right-wingers (both mainstream and overtly white supremacist) that violent crime by African-Americans is out of control — and that blacks are criminally victimizing whites at massive and disproportionate rates — the facts say otherwise. As I show in the below analysis:

* Only about 1 percent of African Americans — and no more than 2 percent of black males — will commit a violent crime in a given year;

* Even though there are more black-on-white interracial crimes than white-on-black interracial crimes, this fact is not evidence of anti-white racial targeting by black offenders. Rather, it is completely explained by two factors having nothing to do with anti-white bias: namely, the general differences in rates of criminal offending, and the rates at which whites and blacks encounter one another (and thus, have the opportunity to victimize one another). Once these two factors are “controlled for” in social science terms, the actual rates of black-on-white crime are lower than random chance would predict;

* No more than 0.7 percent (seven-tenths of one percent) of African Americans will commit a violent crime against a white person in a given year, and fewer than 0.3 (three-tenths of one percent) of whites will be victimized by a black person in a given year;

* Whites are 6 times as likely to be murdered by another white person as by a black person; and overall, the percentage of white Americans who will be murdered by a black offender in a given year is only 2/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.0002). This means that only 1 in every 500,000 white people will be murdered by a black person in a given year. Although the numbers of black-on-white homicides are higher than the reverse (447 to 218 in 2010), the 218 black victims of white murderers is actually a higher percentage of the black population interracially killed than the 447 white victims of black murderers as a percentage of the white population. In fact, any given black person is 2.75 times as likely to be murdered by a white person as any given white person is to be murdered by an African American.

Now for the full essay:_____

As soon as news began to spread about the horrific and utterly senseless murder of an Australian-born baseball player in Oklahoma at the hands of three young black males (or at least, that’s how they were first described in the media), I knew what would be coming; specifically, into my e-mail inbox and all around the internet. And even though one of the three implicated in the killing is actually white, and so the supposed racial angle of the crime is incredibly convoluted, if indeed race had anything to do with it at all, I had no illusions that this would somehow change the reaction from certain quarters. Whenever something like this happens, white supremacist groups make sure to blanket the web with vitriol in which they seek to remind white folks how endangered we are at the hands of black people. Knowing that many whites are anxious about the changing demographics of the nation — which portend that around 2043 we will no longer be the absolute majority of persons in the U.S — playing upon fears of criminal victimization by people of color is seen as a great way to win new recruits to the white nationalist cause.

And sure enough, it didn’t take long. As soon as I turned on my computer yesterday morning, there it was: an e-mail from an angry and rather blatantly racist white male, spouting all the same nonsense as I’ve come to expect in moments like this. More savvy than most though, he made sure not to rely on data and arguments from neo-Nazis, but rather from well-known black conservative Walter Williams, who just about a week ago penned a column in which he parroted the line of the white racists, inveighing against the supposed epidemic of black-on-white crime. For Williams, it wasn’t the first time he had done this. Several years back, and taking his cues and information straight from the work of white supremacist and separatist Jared Taylor, he had made the same arguments.

As Williams noted, and as many a white nationalist has over the years, 83 percent of the time when violent crime is interracial, the perp is black and the victim is white. So although most criminal violence may be intra-racial (that is to say, black-on-black and white-on-white), when the offender and victim differ racially, it is typically the case that someone black is doing the crime and someone white is suffering the consequences. As the sender of yesterday morning’s e-mail put it, what do I have to say about that?

The answer, of course, is quite a bit, actually. Williams’s claim — which he makes upon the basis of Justice Department data from the National Crime Victimization Survey — suggests an incredible imbalance, almost as if blacks were deliberately targeting white people in a veritable orgy of hate! And yet, upon closer inspection the number isn’t nearly as meaningful as Williams, or the white supremacists who first began circulating it many years ago, take it to be.

Let’s look at the data, so as to better understand the logical fallacy in Williams’s position.

So Just How Dangerous Are Black Folks? The Trouble With Right-Wing Data Analysis

First, according to the 2008 data Williams relied on (see Table 42), which is the most recent comprehensive data published by the Justice Department on violent crime victimizations, that year there were approximately 3.6 million violent crimes involving a single-offender. These crimes include assault, both simple and aggravated (mostly simple), robbery, and sexual assault or rape. Of those 3.6 million violent crimes, whites committed 2.1 million of them (58.4%) while blacks committed about 830,000 (22.8%) About 442,000 (or 12%) involved perpetrators whose race was not known to the victim. Thus, for crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known to the victims (about 3.2 million crimes), whites would have committed about 66 percent (two-thirds) and blacks about 26 percent (one-fourth). If we assume the same rough racial distribution for crimes where the perpetrator’s race was not known as for crimes where the offender race was known (a reasonable guess), this would mean that whites committed an additional 300,000 crimes, roughly, while blacks would have committed an additional 115,000. In all, this would mean that in 2008, whites committed roughly 2.4 million single offender violent crimes, while blacks would have committed around 950,000.

Since there were roughly 31 million African Americans, age 12 and over — and thus eligible for consideration in crime data — in 2008 (this is noted in the same DOJ tables Williams and I are both referencing here), at most, this would mean that for every 1000 blacks in the population there were 30 criminal offenders, and thus, at most, 3 percent of blacks committed a violent crime in 2008 (meaning, importantly, that at least 97 percent did not). And since there were approximately 205 million whites, 12 and over, in the population that year, this would mean that for every 1000 whites in the population there were 12 criminal offenders, and thus, at most, about 1.2 percent of whites committed a violent crime in 2008.*

Of course, in truth, and for both groups, the numbers are quite a bit smaller than this. After all, the 30 offenders per 1000 persons (the 3 percent rate of offending for blacks) are not 30 different people. In other words, to say that 3 percent of blacks commit a violent crime each year would assume that each offender committed only one crime, such that the number of offenses equalled the number of offenders, but that isn’t the case. There are, as we all know, many offenders who commit multiple offenses each year. As such, the number of offenders would be quite a bit smaller than the number of offenses.Criminologists have estimated, for instance, that 70 percent of criminal offenses are committed by just 7 percent of the total offenders, meaning that there is a small hardcore group of seriously predatory criminals out there doing most of the crime. This would mean that 93 percent of all offenders commit just 30 percent of the crimes. So this would mean that of the 950,000 violent crimes committed by blacks in 2008, 70 percent of them (or 665,000) would have been committed by just 7 percent of all black offenders, while 285,000, roughly, would have been committed by the other 93 percent of offenders. If we assume that the 93 percent who weren’t the major repeat offenders only committed one crime each (likely a conservative estimate, but one which errs on the side of the right-wing argument by maximizing the potential numbers of black offenders), this would mean that, at most, the 285,000 offenses actually equate to 93 percent of the offenders. If 285,000 represents 93 percent of all black offenders, then the remaining 7 percent of offenders above that number would come to only an additional 20,000 or so offenders — major hardcore criminals who commit about 665,000 crimes each year. This would mean that at most there might be a little more than 300,000 individual black violent offenders each year. As a percentage of the 12 and over black population in 2008, this would represent only about 1 percent of all blacks who will commit a violent crime in a given year, versus 99 percent who will not. Even if we just restricted the analysis to black males — and even if all these crimes were committed by males, which they were not — it would mean that no more than 2 percent of black males would commit a violent crime in a given year. This alone is an important point to keep in mind, as it suggests that having a generalized fear of black folks, or black men, is the height of statistical irrationality.

BTW, a blog from a guy who says, "DailyKenn.com is the right wing extremist the liberal media warned you about". And you really want to chastise me? Sure thig kiddo. You are funny. Hypocritical but funny.

BTW, a blog from a guy who says, "DailyKenn.com is the right wing extremist the liberal media warned you about". And you really want to chastise me? Sure thig kiddo. You are funny. Hypocritical but funny.

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